Mateiu Caragiale - Guided by an amoral opportunist, the shadowy narrator and his two affluent friends drink and gamble their way through a city built on the ruins of crumbled castles and bygone empires. The novel’s shimmering, spectacular prose describes gripping vignettes of love, ambition, and decay

 

Mateiu I. Caragiale, Rakes of the Old Court: A

Novel, Trans. by Sean Cotter, Northwestern

University Press, 2021. [1929.]

Widely regarded as the greatest Romanian novel of the twentieth century, Mateiu Caragiale’s Rakes of the Old Court (Craii de Curtea-Veche) follows four characters through the bars and brothels of Bucharest. Guided by an amoral opportunist, the shadowy narrator and his two affluent friends drink and gamble their way through a city built on the ruins of crumbled castles and bygone empires. The novel’s shimmering, spectacular prose describes gripping vignettes of love, ambition, and decay.

Originally published in 1929, Rakes of the Old Court is considered a jewel of Romanian modernism. Devoted “Mateists” have long read, memorized, and reenacted the novel, and after the Romanian Revolution, it became part of the high school curriculum. Now canonical, Mateiu’s work has been celebrated for its opulent literary style and enigmatic tone.

“In this marvelous classic of Romanian literature, the Rakes take the reader on a journey through the seedy underbelly of a very Balkanic Bucharest in the year 1910, populated by a cast of eccentric characters. A whirlwind of an unparalleled richness of imagery, imagination, and language.” —Jan Willem Bos

"These pages taught us all how to write with style in Romanian. Mateiu Caragiale is the absolute master of using the rare word, shining in the sentence here and there, turning the translator’s task into a challenging and valuable effort. Pashadia’s saga is not the description of a road to perdition, but an elegant response to a heritage of shadows and a reality of deceptions. This is a tale about the very soul of an elusive city. Instead of acting on the political stage, Pashadia prefers withdrawing into the landscape of promiscuous nights. The main characters in this novel are accomplices in a hopeless purgatory. Their choices fascinate and intrigue us, and we can see their shadows walking the streets of Bucharest every night." —Bogdan Suceava

“It is a joy to discover that this much loved interwar classic is available in an excellent new English-language translation. Sean Cotter's translation beautifully captures the novel’s atmosphere of hedonism and decay as well as the voices of the ‘rakes’ who strive to find ‘oblivion’ in ‘a life of debauchery.’” —Gabi Reigh

“In Craii de Curtea Veche Mateiu Caragiale takes us through an intricate labyrinth of nostalgic memories and fantasies of a world that existed primarily as an artifact of the author’s imagination. At the gates of the Levant, the peregrinations of flaneurs through the streets, courtyards, and homes of Bucharest bring into focus a fascinating and dizzying variety of cultural typologies and exchanges. Valued today as an important contribution to modernism in interwar Romania, the novel provides a rich illustration of gender stereotypes and especially self-perceptions of masculinity. Sean Cotter’s translation renders the multiple tropes of deception, self-gratification, and nostalgia deliciously accessible to the English language reader.” —Maria Bucur, author of Gendering Modernism: A Historical Reappraisal of the Canon

"Sean Cotter took up the impossible task of presenting in English the phantasmic magic of Mateiu Caragiale’s Romanian prose, engendered at the seamy border between decadence and civilization in turn-of-the-last-century demimondaine Bucharest, where redolence and stench bind themselves in unsanctioned transactional trysts, where the common currency is the kiss of Judas. We owe him our gratitude." —Julian Semilian

“A dark nostalgia surrounds the crooked and convoluted characters populating Caragiale’s novel, set in an enthralling and ensnaring fin-de-siecle Bucharest. Caragiale’s poignant story and poetic style come to life in Cotter’s masterful translation. A gorgeous rendition in the English language of one of the key texts of Romanian literature.” —Emanuela Grama

...The eponymous Old Court is where much of the action takes place. It was some sort of castle where the old rulers lived but has been demolished and rebuilt several times. There is still an old church there bearing its name but is only because of the church that it is remembered, though here are various remains of ruins there. It is clearly symbolic, as the story has the current somewhat disreputable Romanians cavorting on the traditions of the past.

The four main characters all meet at restaurant there and indulge in eating, drinking and gambling. All four are partially well-off and educated. It is Pena Corcodusa who nicknames them The Rakes of the Old Court. Thirty five years previously, she had a fling with Sergei Leuchtenberg-Beauharnais, a handsome Russian officer and grandson of the Tsar. However, he had been killed in action and she never seemed to really recover and is now a drunk.

The four men are our narrator, Pantazi, Pasadia and Gorica Pirgu. Our narrator had met Pantazi in the park. They become close friends. The man lived within a boundless absence of care, nothing and no one bothered him. Pasadia hid a passionate soul, complex, tenebrous, and which, despite his control, would betray itself in slips of cynicism. All three are gentlemen and we get a colourful and, at times improbable, back story for them. Pirgu is a different kettle of fish. Wherever he went, Gorica was greeted with open arms, if not always by the front door. The narrator slyly comments with his lack of culture or high ideals, his minute knowledge of the world of thugs, pimps, and con-men, ruined maids, whores, and hurdy-gurdies, of the depraved and their speech—without much effort, Pirgu could have become one of the foremost authors of his nation. In short, Pirgu is a womaniser, drunk, opportunist, low-life, yet the other three seem strangely attracted to him. The narrator describes him as the living incarnation of excremental Bucharest, while he himself says I want to be a whorehouse regular. Despite this, it is Pirgu who is the patriot, the other three less so. - The Modern Novel      read more here

Rakes of the Old Court, set in Bucharest, Romania, around 1910, is a portrait of place, times, and lifestyles -- all conveyed as much, or more so, in the style of the writing as in what is being described. It is a fin de siècle canvas of a place and slice of society with Parisian aspirations but aware too that it sits at the fringes of Europe, its cosmopolitan decadence saturated by the continental -- a still-pre-war Europe -- but also tinged by the very local.

The narrator has a "restricted circle" of acquaintances -- if not entirely a select one: the chosen few, for example: "would never have included Gorică Pirgu, if he were not the inseparable fellow of Paşadia, for whom I had a boundless devotion". The novel is presented in four loosely connected chapters centered around a quartet of characters -- the narrator and his small circle. The narrator notes: "Alone in Bucharest from a young age, living on my own, I kept distant from the herds", and there's little mixing with the masses here, the small circle mostly concerned with themselves, dining and meeting together.

Caragiale acknowledges his young alter-ego's limited perspective and experience -- reflected then also in the novel --, as one of the acquaintances points out to the narrator:

They were talking about you today, before you came, they said you were working on a novel of manners, set in Bucharest, and I could barely keep from laughing. I mean, really: you and Bucharest manners. Maybe Chinese manners, as far as that goes, because you might as well be Chinese. How are you supposed to know manners, when you don't know anybody ? Aside from us, I mean, maybe if you wrote about Paşa, me Panta -- with anyone else you won't know what you're doing ... ah, yes, maybe my friend Poponel. Now if you visited some homes, met some families, that would change things, you'd see how much you'd have to write about, what characters !

The narrator does expand his horizons some over the course of his account, notably in the final chapter, but Rakes of the Old Court remains far from a typical Bildungsroman -- as indeed Caragiale seems only limitedly interested in charting his narrator's growth, devoting much of the space to the stories of the more fully-formed others in the group.

It's a rather loose-knit group the narrator is part of, pulled in different directions even as they repeatedly circle back to each other; they're very different characters with different backgrounds -- though all seem to enjoy a rather laid-back, easy-going lifestyle. Typically, too, they're only loosely rooted in and connected to the present-day, as much of the novel is also a lament for a lost past -- personal and general. So, for example, they happily escape the present in their imaginations:

Then a new journey began, no less beguiling, a journey into centuries past. We would find ourselves in a century dear to us, and in all senses nostalgic: the eighteenth.

As translator Sean Cotter notes in his Preface: "The book offers atmosphere, but few events", and indeed the novel is more one of episodes and scenes than one offering a full-fledged story-arc. So also, as the narrator notes of the group's get-togethers:

But the real pleasure came in our idle conversation, the palaver that embraced only the beautiful: travel, the arts, letters, history -- history especially -- gliding through the calm of academic heights

The novel is a motley canvas, but one rich in detail and color. If many bits feel stray, there are also longer pieces, actual stories such as in the chapter 'Confessions', which is largely one of the other character's accounts, revealing an unexpected personal history (and identity), a life of great excess, a great fall -- and then a return to previously privileged positions thanks to an inheritance (which turns out to be something rather more and different than a mere stroke of luck).

So also, the final chapter has the narrator immersed in the Arnoteanus' household, with its three very different daughters:

Their house was a combination of way station and an inn, a brothel, a gambling house, and a madhouse, was wide open any time to anyone, the meeting place of all the cursed and inquinate of our time: professional gamblers and provocateurs, drifters, stumblers and the fallen, the broken and the broke, ravaged by the taste for a life without work and above power, willing to sate their desire by any means

The narrator here moves in an even more condensed and extreme form of the world he otherwise knows -- though he can handle it only for a time, eventually leaving it behind him.

In the narrator's description of listening to one man's story, Caragiale seems to suggest his own ambitions and approach:

The narration undulated languidly, braiding a rich garland of notable literary blossoms from all peoples. Master of the craft of painting with words, he effortlessly found means to express, in a tongue whose familiarity he claimed to have lost, even the most slippery and uncertain forms of being, of time, of distance, such that the illusion was always complete. As though bespelled, I undertook long imaginary journeys with him, journeys such as no dream ever provided ... the man spoke. Before my eyes unrolled charming throngs of tangible visions.

There is attention to descriptive detail in the novel -- how much there is already just in a simple gesture, as when one girl holds out: "her tiny, gloved hand palm up, so I could kiss the bare skin above her wrist" -- but above all Caragiale luxuriates in language. Much is high-flown, but he also (via translator Cotter) does the baser and basic very well:

Eh, what can you say, with everything and everything, with all her faults, a badmouther, a bedjumper, a bankbreaker, a blabbermouth, and a flake, who says and does everything upside-down and backwards and above all dangerously, ready to get you in trouble, still Mima had her fun side

Translating all of Caragiale's great range is, of course a great challenge, and Cotter's discussion of his approach, in his Preface and the notes to the text, offers welcome insight into some of what he does here. Cotter notes his: "translation follows a tradition of reperformances", and gives a variety of examples of choices and approaches to specific issues. So, for example, in a note to the 'Confessions'-chapter he explains:

In this chapter, Mateiu creates a contrast with other parts of the novel by including many Greek terms in Pantazi's account of his family. Some of these exist in English, though they are rare enough to require notes here. In my translation, I have also opted for words with Greek etymologies ("petrified", "catastrophe") where they were available.

This kind of helpful supporting material gives English-language readers a better sense of the effect of the original, though clearly it's not possible to capture the full range of Caragiale's style-play.

The slim novel can, in translation, not easily live up to its exalted reputation in Romanian, but Cotter's flights of language shine sufficiently to give some sense of its appeal. The strong characters -- beyond the central quartet, too, in figures such as "the storied Sultana Negoianu", or the youngest of the Arnoteanu daughters, Ilinca -- and the succinctly phrased dark turns of some of the episodes easily make quite an impression too. If at times the whole has a nebulous feel, the specifics tend to be razor sharp.

Rakes of the Old Court is a stylish -- in very distinct fashion -- late-decadent work, and it is certainly good to have it now available in an English translation that captures much of what is essential to the original. - M.A.Orthofer

https://www.complete-review.com/reviews/romania/caragialem.htm

Untranslatablilty draws me to translate Mateiu Caragiale’s 1929 novel, Rakes of the Old Court. One of the central texts of Romanian literature, its singular, impossibly ornate Romanian weds so well to its decadent subject that asking the work to embrace English seems a betrayal, like begging it to break a solemn vow. Fortunately, adultery is completely consonant with the many depraved themes the book presents.

To imagine the atmosphere of the book, we may start with the author himself. Dressed in a green frock, buttoned shoes, cape, and bowler hat, with his mustache waxed, face lightly powdered, and head held aloof, Mateiu Caragiale (1885-1939) stood out from the crowd on the streets of Bucharest, a Symbolist decadent lost in a Balkan capital. A poet and author of three novels, Mateiu is referred to by his first name, to distinguish him from his father, the highly influential comic playwright, Ion Luca Caragiale. His illegitimate son, Mateiu was raised on the periphery of his family and surrounded by writers and actors, company which may have helped him to learn affectation. He had a passion for heraldry and noble titles (a drive many critics attribute to his family background), which lead him to include descriptions of escutcheons and blazons in his works, where they blend with his already highly ornamented writing. His books (including the fragment of a detective novel) describe characters of uncertain ancestry, airs of fog and mystery, and plots of decadence and abasement. He is a self-conscious inheritor of Edgar Allen Poe, whose atmosphere he expands into a definition of Balkan identity. While he enjoyed a few, fanatic supporters during his lifetime, Mateiu suffered from his lack of readers, always too few in comparison with the broad appeal of his father’s plays.

Mateiu’s most successful novel, Rakes of the Old-Court attempts to encapsulate a vision of the Balkans, depicting a world of corrupt nobility, a Bucharest built on the ruins of an ancient castle, one which only housed failed leaders. Despite its pessimistic surface, the work moves its reader with its nostalgia for ruins, its sympathy for vulnerable, lost personages. Four characters move through Bucharest houses, bars, and brothels, drinking and gambling among tragic characters and intriguing antiques. The book is prized above all for its ornate style, filled with archaic Romanian and saturated with Turkish, Rroma, and Greek vocabulary. The novel’s style provides ample demonstration of the complicated history of Romania, a nation at the crossroads of dead empires, the Ottoman, Russian, and Austro-Hungarian. All this complexity flows through the serpentine, opulent sentences, glittering in conflicting linguistic inheritances. The text resembles the turtle, in Huysmans’s À rebours, that Esseintes covers in jewels—the novel is a melancholy, reptilian world, lavishly ornamented in language.

Rakes has enjoyed both underground and official success. During the strictest Communist-era control of literary life, Rakes was read, memorized, and even re-enacted by small cliques of “Mateists.” His lush descriptions of ambiguity and secrecy provided contrast with and relief from the oppressive, bright optimism of Socialist Realism. While it received some scholarly attention under Communism, the book and author would have to wait until after the events of 1989 to gain canonical status. Both Mateiu and his father’s works then enjoyed tremendous popularity, even spawning a political party. During the 1990s, Mateiu’s work became required reading in high schools, and in 1995 Rakes was made into a film. In 2001, a poll of over one hundred literary critics chose Rakes as the best Romanian novel ever written. - Sean Cotter

https://pen.org/on-translating-matieu-caragiale/

also translated as:

Gallants of the Old Court: A Novel, eLiteratura, 2013.

The Romanian writer Mateiu I. Caragiale (great playwright Ion Luca Caragiale's son), lived between 1885–1936. His main literary works are the short story Remember (1921) and the novel Gallants of the Old Court (1929, Romanian Writers Society's Award). He shines through the originality and distinction of his masterly controlled style.

Written in the first person, The Gallants of the Old Court (Craii de Curtea-Veche) reveals the traits of, and satirizes, Romanian society in the early 20th century. Three self-indulgent, decadent characters while away their time, drinking, playing cards, chasing women. They also make allowance for the company of Gore Pirgu, an uncultured self-seeker of very low extraction, whose abominable character mirrors the new political class of the time.

In this novel, the dying world of medieval boyars meets a rising fiercely capitalistic world, with new rules and ruthless behavior. Respected Romanian literary critic George Calinescu wrote: Reality is transfigured, it becomes fantastical and a sort of Edgar Poe-like unease stirs these worthless figures of the old Romanian capital.

Gallants of the Old Court opens a fascinating universe in front of us, as well as explains usually untapped regions of the human soul, helping us to better understand not only most of the Byzantine, Balkan, and Romanian spirit, but also a large size of our own unexplored self.

The translator has done a painstakingly perfectionist work in rendering the text into English in the best possible way and also explaining every detail that might help us understand the spirit and the letter of the original, even without any hint of knowledge of Romanian.

Gallants of the Old Court is a great read and one of the masterpieces of world literature; and this translation is surely the best so far.